Tuesday, 4 August 2009

The BBC believes that on average, the population has read just 6 of these 100 books. Quite disappointing, don't you think? Why not go through the list and see how many you've read.

(I can't seem to find the original source for this. If anyone could find it, that'd be great. Also, there seems to be more than one list - others, for example, have the Harry Potter books as separate entries.)

Bold are the books that I've read.

01 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen -
02 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -
03 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -
04 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling -
05 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee -
06 The Bible -
07 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -
08 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell -
09 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens -

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy –
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald -
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll -
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame -

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -
34 Emma - Jane Austen -
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis -
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne -

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving -
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery -
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan -

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen -
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens -
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon -
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas-
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie –
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens -
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker -
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -
76 The Inferno – Dante -
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession - AS Byatt –

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White -
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl -
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -

So I've read a quarter of the books on the list. How many have you read, and how do you compare to an "average" person?

Tim

Cross-posted here.

2 Comments:

  1. InspectorAlleyn said...
    I've read around a third of those, will read at least ten more this school year, and own about three fourths. A well-educated person needs to have read more then six of those books, honestly.
    Tim said...
    It's sad, isn't it...

    I would say ten to fifteen should be average, possibly.

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